The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French

The Colonial Fortune highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics that emanates from a significant body of contemporary texts, both Hexagonal and non-metropolitan. The writers examined include those directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clezio, Paule Constant, Edouard Glissant, Tierno Monenembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leila Sebbar) and those who do not overtly manifest such a concern (Stephane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Regis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon). The book presents a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical and conceptual presence of colonialism in the current postcolonial era. The paracolonial refers to the revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue that point to the permanence of the colonial in the contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era's concern with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today's political and cultural conversation, and literature's ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.